Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Tonight I had the opportunity to see just how the infamous Dark Elves operate on the battlefield. I took on Ryan's Dark Elf army and sadly got crushed in the 5th turn. While my army is very weak on magic, Dark Elves happen to be very good at it. So good in fact that one of his two spell casters turned the tide in turn 3 and managed to absolutely change the flow of the game.
Here is the deployment that we started out with. I only have the one picture since the other pictures did not turn out very well but I'll narrate the battle as best that I can.

As you can see here I managed to position my Waywatchers and my Waywatcher General right in the middle of his army. I got the first turn and managed to use my Scouts (bottom of picture in the forest) to kill his repeater ballista and then my Waywatchers moved out and assassinated his big spellcaster. While these were two very important kills they did not do enough since I was in such a rush to get to the next turn that I failed to shoot with the two units of Glade Guard (which I might add was a COSTLY mistake).
Ryan's turn 1 ended up with his Harpies (the MVP of the game) charging my Scouts and then in the next turn his other spellcaster managed to cripple my large Wild Rider unit by reducing their Weapon Skill to 1. I failed my Break test and lost 400 points worth of Wild Riders to a 66 point unit ... ffs.
I managed to wipe out an entire unit of Cold Ones with my Waywatchers but sadly his Assassin showed himself and bushwacked my entire Waywatcher unit. From that point I began to slowly get in my own way while Ryan maneuvered his units into position and was able to pull out the devastating Overrun in turn 5 which saw my Wardancers and Treekin die.

Ryan won by over 500 victory points and I learned how not to play against Dark Elves. Overall a fun time!
Best part of Fantasy so far is that you really can not be sure that you have won or lost til the end of the game (sans total route) and I had a blast getting my Woodsy teeth kicked in.

The other upside is that after over a dozen games with this army I'm beginning to slowly see small changes that I can make to the list that would be a bit more effective while still keeping the same overall theme. I'm really enjoying my fast cavalry and while I love my Waywatchers, I feel perhaps a smaller unit of them would be easier to manage and free up some much needed points for other units. (Much like your first experiments with your Seer Council there John ... interesting parallel!) My Treeman has been hit or miss as have my Treekin but I am loathe to swap them out for other units because they do add a durability to my army that is very needed. The other thing I need to do is work on a better deployment strategy since not all armies barrel ahead to kill you like Ogres and Warriors of Chaos. So some alternate deployment tactics will need to be mastered in order to be not only a bit more successful but also allow me to just become a better player overall.

Monday, April 26, 2010

This update pretty much is a collection of 4 posts that I have been meaning to do one at a time but ended up running short on time. So without much further ado, the update!

'Ard Boyz 2250 Preparation Battle for May Tournament.

Aubrey wanted to test out her 2250 Necron list for 'Ard Boyz and being the kind and friendly person that I am, I decided to let her test her mettle against the ceramite armor of the Emporer's favorite Space Marine Chapter - The Black Templars. After Roy and Shawn suckered me into getting into this money-sink..er I mean hobby and I collected my Ulthwe` Eldar army, I wanted to play Space Marines. Roy mentioned that Black Templars not only wore black armor but were an assault based chapter. I was sold! So...allow me to narrate the battle.

I went first during this battle and with standard Black Templar tactics, went barreling forward with everything I had in order to smash into her line. She had a curious deployment in which she castled up everything into one corner. This ultimately proved to be her undoing...

So Turn 1 movement

More of Turn 1, Aubrey's C'tan gets popped by a barrage of Las Cannon fire (teehee) while she assaults my bike squad with her Wraiths.

This is the scene at the top of Turn 2, she's already lost 2 squads of Necron Warriors, 1 squad of Destroyers, her Necron Lord was popped by Lascannon shots and both Monoliths have been Wrecked.
Her turn she managed to take out 3 out of 5 Terminators and 3/4th's of my Assault based Initiate squads with her rapid fire Gauss Rifles. Things are looking ...grim.

Turn 3 ended up with the Necrons being tabled when the other 2 bike squads slammed into her flank and the rest of my melee squads sliced and dice through her Necron Warriors with their power weapons.

After looking at our battle, I sat down and tried to figure out why after turn 2 the game became a total route. I decided that castling up like the way she did against an assault based army instead of setting up a gun line with her monoliths shielding her C'tan was not the best of ideas. If she had used her Monoliths (or just taken 1) to shield the C'tan and put her Necron Lord in a squad I think she would have had a larger margin of success against my Black Templars.

I played a second game that evening against Mike's Lizardman army. Mike is slowly building to 2250 and since we are both relatively new to Fantasy we enjoy the smaller point games til we get the full swing of things.

Mike reaffirming that I am in fact awesome.

This game went a little bit faster than my game with Aubrey. Mike was plagued with bad Stupidity roles on his key units (his General with his saurus unit and his Cold Ones calvary). The game ended up being a Massacre (a total victory) for me and I have to say the dice just said no that game to Mike. There really wasn't anything he could have done that would have changed the outcome. Sometimes the dice just say NOPE!

I recently decided that I wanted to have some customized Wild Riders for my Wood Elf army. Primarily because I decided that I hadn't spent enough money on a single unit and I needed to ensure that I had hit the ridiculous level for this army. I didn't really care for the horses that the Wild Riders come modeled with so I decided that by using Privateer Press's Raptor units I would be able to have Wood Elves on Stags...AWESOME RIGHT??
Anyway here are some pictures of the assembly process as well as some WIP's thus far.

Here I have drilled a hole in the bottom of the Wild Rider torso's and put in a pin to be fitted to their mount. Wait a sec....John pinned something? No, seriously John pinned something and didn't have the pin vice spear into his hand causing a fountain of blood to cover everything like a Khornite orgy?
I then did a quick measure and figured out how much of a torso I would need to green stuff in order to make the rider fit properly on his mount without having a heinous gap.

As you can see here it worked out fairly well, I'm not the best person at molding green stuff but this was definitely a great way to get better at it.

For those of you who are not the best at pinning yet want to use a very strong bond, I would like to throw out this trick to you. I like to use a very thing piece of tissue or toilet paper and put glue on each side of it. I then push the pieces together and the paper adheres to each side of the model forming a solid and complete bond. Sometimes the bond is so solid you have to pry it apart with a tool, other times it's just a little stronger than your standard super glue bond. Either way it's worked out very well for me and so I thought I'd share that with you all. The excess paper is easily trimmed off since it's dry and brittle minutes after you glue and it also fills in the gaps rather nicely!

Wild Riders all primed up along with Morghur (Beastman army Special character).

Wild Rider torso testing out the new Liquitex flo-aid that I purchased a few days prior. It lays down a pretty smooth coat with the darker paints but the lighter shades it makes the paint a little too thin.
I've been using a 1to 10 ratio on it using distilled water. I guess the trick is to get used to it and from there I'm sure I'll have better results.

Not to be confused with the feminine product flow-aids....ahem....moving along now....

I am so glad I remembered to actually start lowest to highest unlike last time. The picture was taken when the wash was still wet on the right, after it dried it looked a lot better and had really shaded the Elf flesh well.

And lastly, I had wanted to use a Battle Standard Bearer for my Wood Elf army. Rerolling break tests is kinda big when you have multiple combats going on withing inches of each other. So I figured why not try to make your own banner?
I will just throw the pics of what I have done so far in a smaller format that you can kinda figure out what I did step by step. It looks kinda wonky and I may just end up getting the actual Battle Standard Bearer model later but we'll roll with this for now.

Hope you all enjoyed this post, it's insanely long and I apologize for that. Next go around I'll just do multiple smaller updates!

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Today I went up against Jeremy's extremely tough and durable Ogre Kingdoms army (which henceforth we will call the Raging Bulls). The first two games I played against his Ogres ended up in Massacres where I was scrambling after turn 4 to just get away. Today however I decided to try a different tactic and deployment which paid off.
If you are unfamiliar with the Ogre Kingdoms army allow me a moment to describe just how difficult they are to defeat. The entire army starts out with a Toughness of 4, Unit Strength of 3 each and all of them have 3 wounds on their basic guys (sans Gnoblars but ...yeah). In addition to being walking slabs of meat they also have a movement of 6. To 40k players this is nothing big, since everyone moves 6" in 40k. To Fantasy players this is problematic because the average movement rate is 4 in Fantasy. Not to mention also when Ogres charge into combat they inflict Impact Hits which also count towards Combat Resolution. So you end up having an army of multiple multi-wound models that move 6 (charge 12), that cause Fear, Impact Hits and have a good strength coming across the field at you. Definitely a strong psychological impact on the opposing player. You can also throw in that Ogre magic is very frustrating since it takes an absolute truckload of Dispel dice to counteract their multiple casting. So, it's safe to say they are not a powderpuff army that folds easily. Jeremy's list was also very tough and well put together. Man-eaters, Bulls, Iron-guts, Butchers, and Lead Beltchers peppered the field.

When you compare this list to the Wood Elves, you now have what I like to call polar opposites. The entire Wood Elf army is Toughness 3, Movement 5, and for the most part Strength 3. My army is primarily an archery army that fills it's ranks with Treekin, Dryads and Fast Calvary. My entire list is built around my Waywatchers. When I decided to jump into Fantasy I read the Wood Elf army book and fell in love with the concept of Waywatchers. The nerdy roleplayer in me came screaming to the forefront and demanded I make an army that was filled with elves shooting bows and angry tree-people rending and tearing. So... here is my 2250 list for Fantasy.

The Great Hunt, War Host of Athel Loren
2250 Wood Elf Fantasy Army List

Deployment of our forces - note the line of archers on the Wood Elf side with everything behind them. This is important later!

Beginning of the game, Jeremy went first and marched his entire army forward. I looked on with a stoic expression on my face. I will attempt to make this a brief description since most of our turns involved me shooting and shooting and shooting and shooting until he hit my line.

Once Jeremy's Ogres declared their charges against the line of Scouts and Glade Guard I had in front of my melee troops, I decided to flee instead of standing and shooting which caused him to fail his charges. Also, keep in mind that my units behind my archers are Immune to Psychology so they do not panic when a friendly unit flees through them. This tactic I like to call the Archer Screen worked out very well. Jeremy did an excellent job however of making sure he was close enough to hit one of my squads of Druids set to receive his charge.

This was the scene at the top of Turn 6, I ended up charging with my Wild Riders and killing his unit of Ironguts as well as obliterating his Standard Bearer. I could not for the life of me finish off his General that had only 1 wound left. He made 9 Ward Saves after my Waywatchers and General unloaded on him and still managed to hold out til the game ended. Dead General DENIED!

In the end I managed to actually pull out a Victory because I ended up having 1060 points left on the board at the end of the game to his 528. I would like to point out that this General of Jeremy's and it's unit took out my Treeman, 3 Treekin, 8 Dryads and a unit of Glade Guard (that's 696 points btw).

Jeremy calls his General by some name but I call him DeNiro, the Raging Bull!

In the end I had a great time, and being able to finally beat Jeremy's Ogres instills me with confidence that my Wood Elves don't totally suck!
Wood Elf Archer Screen tactic - success!

Friday, April 16, 2010

A friend of mine asked me when I was going to finally get around to making a blog for all of my Warhammer armies. I sat down and thought about it for a little while then I got up and asked my girlfriend if I should make a blog that deals with Warhammer.
She asked me "Does this making of a blog mean that you will not feel the need to tell me about your little war games and army lists?"
I responded "Yes."
She then with great gusto and excitement responded "Please God YES!" after which she danced a jig...
So...here we are.

I play both Warhammer 40k and Warhammer Fantasy. I will be detailing my armies in later posts along with pictures and all that jazz of crap I've collected and painted. There will also be ramblings and probably a lot of complaining about how army X or army Y just kicked the crap out of me yet army Z got totally owned, etc...
I also enjoy posting battle reps and army lists so you also have that nonsense to enjoy as well!

Current Armies for Warhammer 40k
The Company of the Damned - Eldar Ulthwe` Strike Force (1500 and 2000 point lists)
Helbrecht's IX Legion - Black Templar Assault Force (1500 and 2000 point lists)

Current Armies for Warhammer Fantasy
The Great Hunt, Warhost of Athel Loren - Wood Elf Army (2250 list)